Aghul is a Lezgic language spoken by the Aghuls in southern Dagestan,

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

and in

Azerbaijan Azerbaijan, officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, is a Boundaries between the continents, transcontinental and landlocked country at the boundary of West Asia and Eastern Europe. It is a part of the South Caucasus region and is bounded by ...

. It is spoken by about 33,200 people (2020 census).

Classification

Aghul belongs to the Eastern Samur group of the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family.

Geographic distribution

In 2002, Aghul was spoken by 28,300 people in Russia, mainly in Southern Dagestan, as well as 32 people in Azerbaijan.

Related languages

There are nine languages in the Lezgian language family, namely: Aghul, Tabasaran, Rutul, Lezgian, Tsakhur, Budukh, Kryts, Udi and Archi.

Phonology

Aghul has contrastive epiglottal consonants. Aghul makes, like many Northeast Caucasian languages, a distinction between tense consonants with concomitant length and weak consonants. The tense consonants are characterized by the intensiveness (tension) of articulation, which naturally leads to a lengthening of the consonant, so they are traditionally transcribed with the length diacritic. The gemination of the consonant itself does not create its tension, but morphologically tense consonants often derive from adjoining two single weak consonants. Some Aghul dialects have a large number of permitted initial tense consonants.

Vowels

Consonants

* The

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

transcribed here is named rather ambiguously a "glottalic laryngeal" by the source.

Alphabet

The Aghul alphabet was devised in the 1990s. Ever since then, it has been used as a language of education, with primers, textbooks, and dictionaries published.

Grammar

Case

There are four core cases: absolutive, ergative, genitive, and dative, as well as a large series of location cases. All cases other than the absolutive (which is unmarked) and ergative take the ergative suffix before their own suffix.

Adjectives

Independent and predicative adjectives take number marker and class marker; also, case if used as nominal. As attribute they are invariable. Thus ''idžed'' "good", ergative, ''idžedi'', etc. ''-n, -s;'' pl. ''idžedar''; but ''Idže insandi hhuč qini'' "The good man killed the wolf" (subject in ergative case).

Pronouns

Personal pronouns

Vocabulary

Sample text

References

Bibliography

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External links

Languages of the World report

Aghul basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{authority control Northeast Caucasian languages Languages of Azerbaijan Languages of Russia Endangered Caucasian languages Languages written in Cyrillic script